Biography

Federica Francesconi is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Judaic Studies Program at the University at Albany, SUNY. Her research and publications address the social, religious, and cultural aspects of the early modern history of Jews in Italy, focusing on the multifaceted politics and dynamics of ghetto life. Her recent book, Invisible Enlighteners: The Jewish Merchants of Modena, from the Renaissance to the Emancipation (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), is the 2022 Helen and Howard R. Marraro Prize Winner, granted by the American Historical Association. She has held fellowships in Europe, Israel, and the United States. Her new project, tentatively titled The Jewish Home in Early Modern Venice: Cosmopolitan Intimacy, Global Networks, and Diasporic Material Culture, has received a 2022-24 Gladys Krieble Delmas Grant.

Project Summary

This project explores the Jewish home in Venice during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a multi-religious and multi-ethnic webwork of individuals, communities, and objects in motion. It uncovers an unexplored nexus of early modern Italian and Jewish culture, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim encounters, and the global Renaissance. Although the ghetto was a space of physical segregation, oppression, and housing scarcity, unlike many domestic spaces of that era, the Jewish homes in Venice connected outward to the broader Mediterranean world. This system included cities such as Istanbul, Corfu, Thessaloniki, Jerusalem, Cairo, Fez, Tunis, Skopje, Malta, and Constantine. This study draws on unpublished archival sources in Italian, Hebrew, Latin, Yiddish, Portuguese, Spanish, and Ladino, illuminated and printed books, extant material culture, and the built environment. It argues that the Jewish home was equally shaped by both routes and roots. Routes refer to the histories of interaction, displacement, and transculturation, while roots signify the shaping of premodern Jewish identities through the crossing of social, cultural, religious, and ethnic boundaries. These crossings were inherently contingent and unstable, reflecting the fluid and evolving nature of Jewish life in early modern Venice.